Introduction

The introduction locates Facial Hair and the Performance of Early Modern Masculinity in terms of the current writing on beards and the methodological approach that it will take. It uses early modern writings to consider the role that beards play in the ideological production of manliness in early modern society, and specifically in theatrical representations from the sixteenth-century onwards. It also considers what a beard is and examines what staged beards reveal about the embodiment of masculinity from a theoretical perspective.